Do you want to start a
WordPress blog the right way? We know that starting a blog can be a
terrifying thought specially when you are not geeky. Guess what – you
are not alone. Having helped over 130,000+ users start a blog, we have
decided to create the most comprehensive guide on how to start a
WordPress blog without any technical knowledge.
The process is easy to follow whether you are 20 years old or 60
years old.

What do you need to start a WordPress blog?

There are three things you need to start a WordPress blog:

A domain name idea (this will be the name of your blog i.e wpbeginner.com)

A web hosting account (this is where your website live on the internet)

Your undivided attention for 30 minutes.

Yes, you read it right. You can start a blog from scratch in less
than 30 minutes, and we will walk you through the whole process, step by
step.
In this tutorial, we will cover:

How to Register a Domain Name for Free

How to Choose the Best Web Hosting

How to Install WordPress

How to Change Your Theme

How to Write Your First Blog Post

How to Customize WordPress with Plugins

How to Make Money From Your Blog

Resources to Learn and Master WordPress

Ready? Let’s get started.

Video Tutorial

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If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.

Step 1. Setup

The biggest mistake beginners make when starting a blog is choosing
the wrong blogging platform. Thankfully you’re here, so you won’t be
making that mistake.
For 95% of users, it makes more sense to use WordPress.org also known as self-hosted WordPress. Why? Because it is free to use,
you can install plugins, customize your site design, and most
importantly make money from your site without any restrictions
Now you have probably heard that WordPress is free.
You might be wondering why is it free? What’s the catch?
There’s no catch. It’s free because you have to do the setup and host it yourself.
In other words, you need a domain name and web hosting.
A domain name is what people type to get to your website. It’s your
website’s address on the internet. Think google.com or wpbeginner.com
Web hosting is where your website live. It’s your website’s house on the internet. Every website needs web hosting.
A domain name typically costs $14.99 / year, and web hosting normally costs $7.99 / month.
That’s a lot for beginners who are just starting out.
Thankfully, Bluehost, an official WordPress recommended hosting provider, has agreed to offer our users a free domain name and over 60% off on web hosting.

Bluehost
is one of the oldest web hosting companies, started in 1996 (that’s
before Google). They are also the largest brand name when it comes to
WordPress hosting because they host millions of websites including our
own.
On top of all this, Bluehost has been working with WordPress since
2005, and they are committed to giving back. That’s why they have
promised us that if you cannot get your blog online within 30 minutes by
following this tutorial, then our expert team will complete the process for you without any cost. They will compensate us, so you don’t have to. Contact us for free blog setup help.NOTE: At WPBeginner we believe in transparency. If you sign up with Bluehost
using our referral link, we will earn a small commission at no extra
cost to you (in fact, you will save money and get a free domain). We
would get this commission for recommending just about any WordPress hosting company, but we only recommend products that we use personally use and believe will add value to our readers.
Let’s go ahead and purchase your domain + hosting.
Open up Bluehost in a new window and follow along.
First thing you need to do is click on the green Get Started Now button to get started.
On the next screen, select the plan that you need (basic and plus are the most popular).
After that, you will be asked to enter the domain name for your website.
Lastly, you will need to add your account information and finalize
the package info to complete the process. We recommend going with the 36
month plan because that’s best value.
On this screen, you will see optional extras that you can purchase.
It’s entirely up to you whether or not you purchase these, but we
generally don’t recommend purchasing them right away. You can always add
them later on, if you decide that you need them.
Once completed, you will receive an email with details on how to
login to your web hosting control panel (cPanel). This is where you
manage everything from support, emails, among other things. But most
importantly, this is where you install WordPress.

Step 2. Install WordPress

In the cPanel, you will see dozens of small icons for different
services and features. This can be a bit overwhelming, so ignore 95% of
them because you will never need to use them.
Scroll down to the website section and click on the WordPress icon.
You will be redirected to the Bluehost Marketplace Quick Install screen for WordPress. Click on the Get Started button.
On the next screen, you will be asked to select your domain name. Choose the domain from the dropdown and then click Next.
After that, you need to enter your Site Name, username, and a
password for your site. You also need to check all the checkboxes and
then click Install.
The QuickInstall will start installing WordPress. The marketplace
will prompt you to browse WordPress themes, while WordPress is being
installed.
No need to do that right now. We’ll show you how to get free WordPress themes in the next step.
Once WordPress is finished installing, you will see the success notice in the top header bar.
Click on the Installation Complete link, and it will take you to the screen with your WordPress login URL and password.
Congratulations, you have created your WordPress site. That wasn’t too bad right.
Your WordPress login URL will look like this:
http://yoursite.com/wp-admin
Click on the WordPress login link to login to your dashboard.
Now we’re ready to customize your site’s appearance and start blogging.

Step 3. Selecting your WordPress Theme

The visual appearance of your WordPress blog is controlled by themes.
When you first visit your blog, it will look something like this:
This is not very appealing to most people.
Customizing the look and feel of your blog is by far one of the most
exciting and rewarding part in the journey of creating your WordPress
site.
There are thousands of pre-made WordPress themes that you can install
on your site. Some of them are free, while others are paid.
You can change your theme by going to your WordPress dashboard and clicking on Appearance » Themes.
Go ahead and click on the Add New button.
On the next screen, you will able to search from the 4100 free
WordPress themes that are available in the official WordPress.org themes
directory. You can sort by popular, latest, featured, as well as other
feature filters (i.e industry, layout, etc).
When you have found the theme that you like, simply bring your mouse
on it, and it will show the Install button. Click on it and wait for the
theme to be installed. After that, the install button will be replaced
with an Activate button. You need to click on it to Activate the theme.
Once you have installed your theme, you can customize it by clicking on the Customize link under the Appearance menu.

Once you have selected your WordPress theme, you are now ready to create your first blog post.

Step 4. Creating Your First Blog Post

To write your first blog post, click on the Posts » Add New menu in your WordPress dashboard.
You will see an editor area where you can write your first blog post.
Once you’re done writing, go ahead and click on the Publish button on the right to publish your first blog post to the world.
On the posts screen, you will notice several other sections such as
Categories and Tags. You can use these to organize your blog posts. We
have a great writeup on the difference between categories vs tags, which we highly recommend that you read.

Often beginners are confused between posts and pages menu in the
WordPress dashboard.

Step 5. Plugins & Customizations

Once you have written your first blog post, you probably want to get
started with adding other usual elements on your website such as a
contact form, about page, and more.
To further customize WordPress and add features like contact forms, galleries, sliders, etc, you need to use WordPress plugins.
WordPress plugins are apps that allow you to add new features to your website.
There are over 46,000 WordPress plugins available. At WPBeginner, we feature the best WordPress plugins to help you add the functionality that you need.

Step 6. Making Money From Your Blog

Now that you’ve built your blog and customized it to your liking, you
are probably wondering how can I actually make money from my blog?
There are actually several different ways to successfully monetize
your blog, but there is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme. Most
of those are scams.
Don’t be fooled by the pictures of expensive cars and mansions because those are all fake.
Unlike other “make money online” articles
That’s a 4000+ word guide that everyone who starts a blog and wants
to make money from it needs to read. We have shared our 14+ years of
online wisdom in that ultimate guide.
As long as you’re willing to put in the hard work and effort, you’ll reap the reward. Remember, there are no shortcuts.

Step 7. Mastering WordPress

WPBeginner is the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.
At WPBeginner, our main goal is to provide cutting-edge helpful
WordPress tutorials that are easy to u)nderstand for small businesses,
bloggers, and non-techy WordPress website owners

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Having helped thousands of people start a blog, we have answered
quite a lot of questions. Below are the answers to the most frequently
asked questions about creating a blog.Can I create a blog without WordPress?
Yes, there are several other blogging platforms available. We have compared them all, and WordPress is by far the best solution in the market.Can I create a blog without hosting?
No, that’s not possible. Web hosting is where your website files are stored. All websites need web hosting.

WordPress vs. Blogger – Which one is Better? (Pros and Cons)

We are often asked by new users why they should use WordPress instead of free blogging services like WordPress.com
or Blogger? WPBeginner is the largest resource site for WordPress
beginners, so it is obvious that we favor WordPress over other blogging
platforms. In this article, we will do a WordPress vs Blogger comparison
to help you decide which one is better for your needs. We will cover
all WordPress vs Blogger pros and cons, so you can make the best
decision when it comes Blogger vs. WordPress as a platform for your
site.

Important: Please note that this comparison is
between self-hosted WordPress.org and Blogger, not WordPress.com vs
Blogger. Please see our guide on the difference between self-hosted WordPress.org vs Free WordPress.com blog.

1. Ownership

Blogger is a blogging service provided by the tech giant Google. It
is free, reliable most of the time, and quite enough to publish your
stuff on the web. However, it is not owned by you. Google runs this
service and has the right to shut it down, or shutdown your access to it
at any time.
With WordPress, you use a WordPress hosting provider
to host your own site. You are free to decide how long you want to run
it and when you want to shut it down. You own all your data, and you
control what information you share with any third party.
See: How to Start a Blog with WordPress (Step by Step)

2. Control

Blogger is a fine tuned service with very limited tools allowing you
to perform only specific tasks on your website. The things you can do on
your blogspot blog are limited, and there is no way you can extend them
to meet a need.
WordPress is an open source software, so you can easily extend it to add new features. There are thousands of WordPress plugins allowing you to modify and extend the default feature set such as adding a store to your website, creating portfolio, etc.
When comparing WordPress vs Blogger for business websites, then
WordPress is hands down the best long-term solution for any serious
business owner.

3. Appearance

Blogger by default only provides a limited set of templates to use.
You can modify the colors and layout of these templates using the
built-in tools, but you cannot create your own layouts or make
modifications. There are some non-official Blogger templates available,
but those templates are usually very low quality.
There are thousands of free and premium WordPress themes
which allow you to create professional looking websites. There is a
WordPress theme for just about every kind of website. No matter what
your site is about, you will find plenty of high quality themes which
are easy to modify and customize.

4. Portability

Moving your site from Blogger
to a different platform is a complicated task. There is a significant
risk that you will lose your SEO (search engine rankings(, subscribers,
and followers during the move. Even though blogger allows you to export
your content, your data will stay on Google’s servers for a very long
time.
Using WordPress, you can move your site anywhere you want. You can move your WordPress site to a new host, change domain name, or even move your site to other content management systems.
Also if you compare WordPress vs Blogger SEO, then WordPress offers way more SEO advantages.

5. Security

Using Blogger you have the added advantage of Google’s robust secure
platform. You don’t need to worry about managing your server’s
resources, securing your blog, or creating backups.
WordPress is quite secure, but since it is a self hosted solution you are responsible for security and backups. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that make it easier for you.

6. Support

There is limited support available for Blogger. They have a very
basic documentation and a user’s forum. In terms of support, your
choices are very limited.
WordPress has a very active community support system. There is online
documentation, community forums, and IRC chatrooms where you can get
help from experienced WordPress users and developers.

7. Future

Blogger has not seen any major update since a very long time. We have
seen Google kill their popular services such as Google Reader, Google Adsense for feeds, and the possible demise of FeedBurner. Future of Blogger depends on Google, and they have the right to shut it down whenever they want.
WordPress is an Open Source software which means its future is not dependent on one company or individual (Check out the history of WordPress).
It is developed by a community of developers and users. Being world’s
most popular content management system, thousands of businesses around
the globe depend on it. The future of WordPress is bright and
reassuring.

We hope this WordPress vs Blogger comparison helped you understand
the pros and cons To help you make the right decision for your
business.

The sole target of every blogger or web developer is to build a successful and trending blog or website. But before you can create or build a successful website that will boom as you desire, there are some tips you need to know, understand and apply. In this tutorial article, I will explain some of these success tips especially for bloggers and some things you must consider before creating a successful blog or website. I will also reveal how to boost your site traffic for free.

Here are some of the things that determines how successful your blog or website will be. Therefore, you need to put them into consideration before you even start creating a blog or website.

Considering the niche/category of the blog or website

Choosing the design platform/script language

Choosing a good domain name

Choosing a good blog template

Writing engaging and detailed blog posts and articles

Writing guest posts/sponsored posts

Promoting your blog or website

Now, I will elaborate each of these tips. Let’s get started!

Considering The Niche/Category Of The Blog Or Website

This is the first and foremost thing to consider because it will also help you to make the right choice for the subsequent listed tips above. You must first conclude to build a blog or website on a particular niche. Niche is the category of information you intend to provide on your blog/website. In order to create a successful blog, you must first choose a trending niche and also have passion for that niche.

Some of the trending unsaturated niches/categories are: Fashion, Health and fitness, Online food recipes, Sports and gaming, etc. Most people don’t succeed in blogging because they chose the wrong niche or because they don’t have passion for the niche they chose. Don’t choose a niche just because you have passion for the niche. Don’t open a blog and start writing the story of your life unless you just want to blog for fun!

You might find it very difficult to succeed if the niche is already saturated. Also, a niche might be trending but is already saturated because many people blog on the niche. A new blog might find it difficult to gain fame, grow or become noticed in such a niche. Imagine a new blog that is in the same niche with Microsoft website. Imagine how many years it might take it to gain fame and how far it fame will go! Some of the trending saturated niches are: entertainment and celebrity news, tutorials, etc.

Don’t try to combine so many niches in one website. You can combine about 3 similar niches. But if possible, maintain one niche. It helps your site to gain fame faster.

Choosing The Design Platform/Script Language

Once you have decided and concluded on the category of your blog, the next thing to consider is the design platform of your blog or website. By design platform, I mean where you will host your website and the script language to use. For a blog, the 2 most popular platforms are blogger and wordpress.

Blogger.com is a free platform provided by Google to help those who have the passion to own a blog but don’t have the money or the knowledge of how to code or build a website from scratch. One of the advantages of this platform is that you don’t need to buy a hosting. Google hosts your blog for free.. in order to use or create a blog on blogger, you must have an active gmail account. You can always create one for free at gmail.com. Check out How To Create And Setup A Blog On Blogger. Blogger offers a free “.blospot.com” domain name extension. But you can always buy and use a custom domain name which does not include the “.blogspot”.

The second popular platform for a blog is wordpress. Wordpress is a free Content Management System (CMS). It also offers a free”.wordpress.com” free domain name extension you can use until you decide to buy a custom domain name for your blog. It can also be used to create a full complex website, unlike blogger. Another advantage that wordpress site have over blogger sites is that that there many wordpress plugins that help you setup or manage your blog or website.

One of the disadvantages of wordpress CMS over blogger is that you must buy a hosting plan before you can use a custom domain name. The domain registrar I recommend for you is godaddy.com. They have many packages that suits your plan.Before you decide to host your site with a hosting company, first check the features available in the hosting plan you are opting for especially the band width. Go for a plan that as high band width if you are planning to build a huge website with many media like movie, audio, etc.

There are other platforms and language scripts for designing websites and blogs especially if you wish to design from scratch such as php/MySQL, html/css, java, javascript, etc.

Choosing A Good Domain Name

When you have decided on the design platform and scripting language to use, the next important thing to consider is to choose a good domain name. A domain name is a unique URL that directs people to your website or blog when they type it in a web browser. For example, the domain name for this website is www.9Jatechupdates.com. Domain names are usually renewed annually. There are other available domain extensions apart from “.com” such as “.net”, “.edu”, “.org”, “.info”, etc.

A good domain name will help your blog or website to gain fame easily. Here are some of the things to consider that will help you choose a domain name for blog/website:

Avoid too long domain names

Avoid names that have many spelling options/alternatives

Avoid names that start with numbers

Choose a name that will be easier to remember.

Choosing A Good Blog Template

Next is to choose a blog template that will suit your site design and which is also optimized to help your site rank well on search engines. Here are some of the things to consider when choosing a template for your website or blog:

How SEO friendly it is

The load time or loading speed of the template

How user-friendly it is, especially in its mobile view because up to 80% of traffic these days come from mobile phone users.

The colour combinations used in the template.

There are many templates available, both free and paid (premium) versions offered by many websites. The website I recommend is soratemplates.com. They have user friendly and SEO friendly blog templates. You can also design your website or template from scratch if you are good in web development.

Writing Engaging And Detailed Blog Posts And Articles

Engaging and detailed blog posts and articles help your site to rank well on search engines. Search engines like google determine how engaging an article or blog post is by how long visitors spend reading the article because your site visitors will only spend much time reading your blog post if and only if they find it helpful, informative and useful. Avoid copying articles from other similar websites - Plagiarism. It harms the overall ranking of your website on search engines. Carry out extensive research before you write your post articles. This will help to improve the uniqueness and usefulness of your website or blog.

An engaging, unique or useful post must not necessarily be too long. An article can be long without being useful or engaging. An engaging blog post or article must contain some lively, meaningful and unique points such that your page visitors will not fell bored or tired. It can contain links to other pages where some terms are explained better. But don’t overdo it so that it does not increase your page’s bounce rate.

Writing Guest Posts/Sponsored Posts

This is another point that helps to boost the overall ranking of your blog or website. Write guest posts for bigger blog in the same or very similar niche with your blog or website. If you are promoting a product, write sponsored post to bigger similar blogs or websites. This will help to increase the visibility and audience reach of your blog.

Some websites accept guest posts for free while others require that you pay a one-time fee. This website, Microsoft Tutorials also accepts guest posts and sponsored posts from related websites or blogs. You can check out our Guest Post and Sponsored Post Requirements.

Promoting Your Blog Or Website And Blog Posts

Blog/website promotion is one of the proven ways to reach to more audience. There are many media where you can promote and advertize your site or post articles.

Google Adwords is one of the media where you pay google to advertise your website or post articles on their search engine. This will help to boost your site or post search engine ranking.

Another means for promoting your blog is through social media like facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. You can run ads on these social media since they are already popular and have millions of users. This will help expand your audience reach.

Conclusion

I revealed 7 proven tips to help you build a successful and trending website and explained how to apply each tip. If you already have a blog or website and wish to boost its ranking and traffic, consider applying some of the tips in this article. It will help you a lot.

With many years of experience in SEO and web development, I have come to know that one of the secrets to building a successful blog or website is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is because you can boast of a successful website if more than half of its traffic come from Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. SEO involves making your site to be search engine friendly by using the right tags at the right time and place and also avoiding all those things that search engines hate. The easiest way to optimize your website or blog for search engines is to use some SEO tools or software to test your site and improve its Search Engine ranking. One of the most important SEO tip you must do before you write any post article is to first carry out extensive keyword research. This will help you discover the most relevant keywords for that topic and how to use them when writing the article. This tutorial article reveals to you the 10 top, best, recommended SEO tools for your website, both the free and the paid ones.

Google Webmaster Tools & Bing Webmaster Tools

These two webmaster tools constantly analyze your website, shows you how many pages of your website that are indexed and alerts you once an error is discovered and also give you some debugging tips on how to solve the problem. The tools are 100% free. Google and Bing webmaster tools are recommended SEO tools for every blogger and webmaster because they are the 2 most popular search engines.

Before you can use Google and Bing webmaster tools, you must have a gmail and Microsoft account and then setup the tools up.

Google Keyword Planner

Google keyword planner helps you to know exactly what most people are type when searching for a certain product. It is recommended for those who wish to run google Adwords.To use this tool go to http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner. Then enter a keyword or group of keywords into the tool's search bar. Google will help you suggest the monthly volume, competitive terms, etc. that will help you utilize google adwords budget.

Schema Markup Creator

Schema markup creator allows you to customize the way you want your site's search results or attributes like reviews, events, organizations, etc. to appear on search engines. You specify how you want search engines to crawl and index your website or blog.

To use this tool, go to https://www.schemaapp.com/ and create custom schema markup code for your website.

Moz

Moz is an SEO tool that helps you monitor keywords ranking in up to 200 countries on a weekly basis. It generates your site's Search Visibility Score based on Click Through Rates and positions.

Moz monitors mobile friendly tags, makes a comparison of mobile and desktop view ranks. This SEO tool is very unique in that it exposes issues of duplicate content, broken links, missing pages or other crawl errors of your website and makes unlimited audits of public websites for around 1 million pages. It also provides smart SERP analysis and also analyzes keyword for effective keyword strategy with competitive keyword metrics.

Moz SEO tool has the Free Trial version which offers you a 30 days trial for free. It also has premium versions with different pricing plans like: standard, medium, large and premium to suit your budget. The standard plan starts from $99/month. You can try Moz SEO tool at https://moz.com/.

SEO Profiler

SEO Profiler is an awesome, easy to use SEO tool in that it works hand in hand with Google Analytics. This tool will reveal to you the competitor websites of your site and also show you the top ranking keywords and how they are using to rank well so that you can integrate them in your post articles.

Although SEO Profiler is not a completely free tool, but it runs a free SEO audit or analysis of your website and sends it to your email once you sign up for free. You can try this tool at https://www.seoprofiler.com/

Woorank SEO Tool

WooRank is another to recommended SEO tool to help you boost your site rank. The tool gives technical information on your site and also allow you to compare your competitor sites' ranking. It allows you to test your site's SEO at interval to see how it is improving in terms of SEO.

WooRank automatically generates a list of your your site's high ranking keywords and also allows you to add similar keywords you want your website to rank well for as well.

The SEO tool is not completely free. It has a 7-day free trial before deciding whether you want to make use of the Pro Plan at $49 per month or the Premium plan at $149 a month. You can try this tool at https://www.woorank.com/

SEO Centro

SEO Centro is just like SmallSeoTools that offers many SEO features like: SEO Analyzer, Meta Tag Analyzer and Generator, Page Speed Analysis, Mobile Friendly Analysis, Keyword Suggestion Tool, Page Keyword Analyzer, etc. To get maximum benefit from SEO Centro features, open each of the sub-tools individually. It might take you a lot of time, but it will go a long way to improve your site's ranking.

SEO Centro, allows you to enjoy a two-day free trial that can be canceled at any time during that period, They have three paid packages only: Pro - $10 a month, Premium - $20 a month and Enterprise - $40 a month allows for multiple users. You can use this tool at https://www.seocentro.com/

Browseo Tool

Browseo helps you see your website the way a search engine sees it. All you need to do is to enter your site, and this tool will strip your website and show you the way search spiders and bots see it. It also helps you to know the true rank of your website in search engines. You can try this tool at http://www.browseo.net/.

RankScanner

RankScanner is a cloud-based search engine results page tracking tool that is packed with a host of SEO tools. Once you sign up and setup the tool by providing a list of your high ranking keywords, the tool will analyze your SEO performance automatically (once you’ve set up a package) following a specified algorithm.

Rankscanner has both free and premium packages. The Basic Package is free of charge with the most limited available options. Some of their premium packages are: Silver Package - about $10 a month, Gold Package - $32.50 a month and a Platinum Package - $55 per month. You can try this tool at https://www.rankscanner.com/

Conclusion:

I have clearly explained 10 best, free and paid SEO tools to improve your site's Search Engine ranking. As I said earlier in this article, always carry out extensive keyword research even before you start writing any blog post or article. This is a very important SEO tip.

I know you have some suggestions and questions on this 10 Best, Free And Paid SEO Tools To Boost Your Site's SEO Ranking. I will be glad to hear it in the comment section below.